Simon Lee: Now Brown cannot escape the public verdict

Sterling left the Gold Standard in 1931, and the British economy experienced damaging sterling crises and devaluation in July-August 1947, September 1949 and November 1967. Finally, in September 1976, Denis Healey suffered the ultimate humiliation as Chancellor of the Exchequer when he applied to the International Monetary Fund for $3.9bn. Old Labour was the party of devaluation and failed modernisation programmes. Life under New Labour was supposed to be different, built upon the three pillars of monetary stability via a newly-independent Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, fiscal prudence via Gordon Brown's golden and sustainable investment rules,

and enhanced international competitiveness through a risk-based approach to regulation.

As he prepared to leave the Treasury to become Prime Minister in June 2007, Gordon Brown was triumphant. He told the Lord Mayor's Banquet that a "new world order" was being created. There would be no return of "boom and bust".

Within weeks, Northern Rock had suffered the first run on the deposits of a UK bank since 1878. Macro-economic stability and fiscal prudence has been superseded by volatility and imprudence. Brown's British model of political economy lies in tatters.

History will record that it was the mistakes which Brown made as Chancellor which have blighted his tenure as Prime Minister. He will be remembered for having presided over the transition from the Brown Boom to the Brown Bust.

Brown had mistaken an unsustainable consumer and property-led

speculative boom as evidence of the birth of a new economic model, inspired by the monetary and fiscal policy prescriptions of Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987-2006, who had a seemingly unshakeable belief in the capacity of liberalised financial markets to regulate themselves.

Yet Greenspan confessed in October 2008 that his model had been flawed. For 40 years he had believed, mistakenly, that the self-interest of banks and other private market actors was such that "they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders" through self-regulation.

Gordon Brown has blamed the recession on "the first financial crisis of this global age", "the failings of the banking system", and the US sub-prime mortgage market. He has absolved his British model of political economy, and its risk-based approach to financial regulation, from blame.

Greenspan's astonishing confession of flawed thinking exposed Brown's own intellectual failings, and personal responsibility for the severe recession which now forms the backdrop to the forthcoming election.

Building upon Thatcher's legacy of financial market deregulation, Brown's policies altered the balance of power between democracy and finance decisively in favour of the bankers, but who elected them? Taxpayers will be footing the bill for this costly mistake for a generation.

Historians will also record that Brown failed to remedy any of the longstanding deficiencies in investment and skills which have bedevilled the performance of the UK economy for almost a century.

Brown will be remembered as the Prime Minister who wrote three books on the nature of courage, but who bottled the opportunity to seek a democratic mandate for his premiership from the electorate during the late summer months of 2007.

Brown's tenure as Prime Minister will also be remembered for its dithering and failure to address many of the major challenges facing economy and society, namely the funding of care for an ageing population, the deficits in the funding of pensions (public and private), and the replacement of ageing power stations. Power cuts in 2020 will be a fitting tribute to Brown's dithering.

History is likely to judge Gordon Brown harshly as a Prime Minister, especially when the autumn Spending Review finally reveals to the electorate the true implications for taxation and public spending of Brown's previous mistakes.

Having presided over the age of choice, during which public

expectations have been raised artificially high by ambitions to deliver continental European levels of spending on public services, but with North American levels of taxation and government borrowing, Brown's

legacy to his successors is an age of austerity.

The 2010 election is to be fought against the backdrop of the deepest recession for 80 years, and a hugely unpopular Prime Minister with desperate personal opinion poll ratings. This time "Macavity" Brown cannot escape the verdict of the electorate, especially in England, who never elected him as Prime Minister.

The judgment of the electorate may be harsh, but the judgment of political historians upon David Cameron and George Osborne will be even harsher should the Conservative Party fail to win a clear majority at Westminster.

Simon Lee is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Hull. He is author of Boom and Bust: The Politics and Legacy of Gordon Brown.